for filmmaking is a metaphor for life.

Emotional article in Slate by Dana Stevens reminds us of what Altman said during his acceptance speech for his lifetime achievement award (78th Academy Awards earlier this year):

 

I’ve always said that making a film is like making a sand castle at the beach. You invite your friends and you get them down there, and you say, “You build this beautiful structure, several of you.” Then you sit back and watch the tide come in. Have a drink, watch the tide come in, and the ocean just takes it away.

It’s what life is like, isn’t it?

It’s the fundamental human problem - that of mortality. Makes me think of that new Johnny Walker advertisement with the robot talking about wanting to be human and to feel. Robot says it’ll achieve immortality by not wearing out, but tells us that we humans can achieve immortality by doing One Great Thing.

So we all try to build that one great thing, or to write it, or film it. But how to know it isn’t sand by a beach?

For now, Altman’s long and singular list of film-building remains in our memory, it lives on. His immortality is achieved so long as we are around to remember him and what he built. But in a few hundred years? A few thousand? Will there be anyone around that remembers Altman, and all the other Altmans?

I often wonder just what a fluke it is that Plato’s work has survived over the years, but that some other Plato’s work may not have survived, surely has been lost. And then there’s the question of how it survived. Reminds me of Peter Ackroyd’s The Plato Papers, how the puzzle of the past is put together, fictionalised, so arbitrary in a sense, because it all depends on the pure chance of what has survived and how much of it has survived in order to give a possibility of constructing future truths.